Rainbow Creations - Art and Craft for Children, internet retailers of children's art supplies and children's crafts. We aim to give advice on our blog, tips and news relating to our products and children's art and crafts in general.

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Monday, 9 July 2012

Painting with Children.

Exploring paint and painting techniques with children - creative painting.

Paint Types for Children's Use

When choosing paint for the piece of art work intended, it is important to realise that the end result will be different, depending on your chosen paint

Water based paint, known as watercolour is available in many forms.Tempera powder paint, ready mixedpaint, the liquid form, and block paints are all used with water as their base. Acrylic paint, being produced from acrylic, is generally thicker and more opaque than watercolour. It can also be diluted with water. Oil paint is not an ideal paint for children to use as it takes so long to dry.

Experimenting with Painting Techniques

The painting technique used will also give a different outcome. A paint brush does not always have to be used. To help foster creativity within children, encourage them to think of all possibilities of materials used and techniques.

Our Painting Session on Chinese Art

We researched examples of Chinese art and decided on painting Cherry Blossom.

We noted the delicacy of the painting by the Chinese and the quick accurate movements within their style of painting. Based on this we thought watercolour would be the best paint to use - it would flow easily and also leave a variation in intensity.Initially we planned on using a paint brush to paint the branch but then decided blow painting might be more naturally spontaneous, even if difficult to control . We needed to find something we could print the petals of the flowers with. We liked the idea of the circular protrusions from the base of a plastic bottle, but this would have been too big. However we did think, if painting on a large scale, this would be very effective.We tried using our finger tips but still they were to big for the size of the branch. The answer was a pencil end dipped in the paint. We added a tiny red flecks of paint to the flowers once printed in pink paint.Finally to create the signature we translated our names into Chinese writing and added at the side, as can be seen on many paintings of this type, though not sure it is quite right.